Think about what happens when you pour iced tea and lemonade into the same pitcher. You don’t need to stir. You don’t need to force anything. The two liquids find each other naturally, blending into something entirely new—an Arnold Palmer. This is exactly what should happen when you make any institution more open and accessible. Diversity, in other words, can be self-generating.
And here’s what makes this particularly relevant to understanding granola culture: when you have a dominant culture that operates through subtle exclusion, its power should theoretically diminish as the numbers change. Non-conforming individuals form their own communities, create their own spaces, and make isolation less of a threat. The mathematics alone should work in favor of change.
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Here’s the puzzle: it hasn’t.
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In 1991, BIPOC students made up roughly 5.8% of the student body. Today, nearly 35 years later, that figure sits at around 18%. This is important progress, but it still represents less than half a percentage point of growth per year. In comparison to the dramatic demographic transformations the U.S. has seen in the last three decades, UVM’s pace of progress has been like our winters—glacial.
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What’s happening here isn’t the natural blending of iced tea and lemonade. It’s something else entirely. Despite forty years of well-intentioned diversity initiatives, despite changing national demographics, despite everything we know about how inclusion should work, UVM’s student body has remained remarkably, stubbornly static.
The question, then, becomes obvious: What force is powerful enough to override the natural tendency toward diversification? What’s preventing the Arnold Palmer effect?
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​​The answer lies in something most students never see, though they experience its effects every day. To understand it, we need to abandon a fundamental assumption about what granola culture actually is.
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The biggest myth about granola culture at UVM is that it bubbles up organically from the students themselves—that all this flannel-wearing, kombucha-brewing, sunrise-hiking identity is simply Vermont kids being Vermont kids.
And that’s not even close to what’s happening.
There’s a building on campus that most students pass without a second thought. Inside, a small team of professionals makes decisions that shape not just how UVM looks to the world, but who shows up to look at it in the first place. They’re called the Division of Strategic Communications, and they’ve built one of the most elegant systems of cultural selection in American higher education.
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Here’s how it works.
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Granola culture dominates campus expression because the university’s own branding efforts consistently support it. The Division of Strategic Communications leads this initiative. ​​When UVM’s marketing team crafts their messaging, when they choose which students to feature in promotional materials, when they decide what version of university life to showcase, they consistently return to the same archetype: the outdoors-oriented, Vermont-loving student who embodies everything the state wants to project about itself.
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StratComm’s department of University Marketing, head by Executive Director Greg Farnham, has a deceptively simple objective: decide what UVM looks like to the world. The brochures, the website stories, the carefully staged photographs—all of it flows through his department. But Farnham and his team aren’t just documenting campus life. They’re directing it.
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This is where University Communications, run by Executive Director Adam White, enter the picture. If Farnham’s team designs the template, White’s team ensures it becomes reality. The “We’re UVM students” TikToks, the collaborative posts with the Ski and Snowboard Club, the endless stream of granola lifestyle content—this isn’t just promotion. It is, in effect, social engineering.​​​
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On April 2, 2025, UVM’s Instagram put out a post promoting the upcoming African Night Para La Gente, a collaboration hosted by the African Student Association and Alianza de Latines. The event’s aim, as described to the Calendar of Events, was for “students to showcase their talents through performances such as dances, songs, and to highlight their heritage by wearing traditional attire,” also stating that it would be “an exciting opportunity to connect, learn, and celebrate diversity in a fun and inclusive environment.” This post received 455 likes.​
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A week passes. On April 10, UVM releases a different kind of invitation: a ten-slide carousel post with the same line stamped on every frame: “Reason to say ‘yes.’”​​ The photos that follow could be dropped, unchanged, into a Vermont tourism brochure: kayaks on the lake, ice climbing, a swimming hole, stand-up paddling, a sandy beach, mountain biking, more kayaks, backcountry skinning, snowboarders.
Click the link and look closer at these photos. No classrooms. No labs. No definitively student orgs. No recognizable campus landmarks. There is nothing identifiable about UVM in this post. The only hints that this is even supposed to be about Vermont are the distant Burlington skyline in one shot and the Burlington Bikeway sign placed in the dead center of another, as if to be a distinguish it stock photos.
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How many likes did this generic outdoor compilation receive? 2,739. Six times more.
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Here, we have two posts from the same university, posted a week apart. One showcases actual UVM students doing what only UVM students can do—creating a cultural experience unique to this specific community, at this specific moment in time. Somewhere where someone from Accra meets someone from Quito meets someone from Montpelier, and they all discover they have something to teach each other. The other could have been posted by any outdoor retailer, any resort town, any place within five hundred miles that happens to have both water and mountains.
This is the outcome of a marketing system working exactly as designed. Like all of the marketing executed by Bertoni, Farnham, White, and their sizable teams, UVM’s Instagram is both a producer and product of a feedback loop of remarkable precision.
UVM doesn’t market granola culture as one lifestyle among many. It markets granola culture as UVM itself. The endless parade of outdoor recreation and “Vermont” granola isn’t presented as what some students do—it’s presented as what UVM is.​ The students who don’t see themselves when they look at the image UVM platforms simply don’t apply.​ The ones who do apply arrive pre-sorted for exactly the community the marketing promised. Once on campus, they’re backed by institutional authority when they dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their outdoor-recreation worldview as “not really UVM.”​
When the student body starts to actually resemble the brochures, the marketing department has proof their strategy works. More granola marketing follows. More granola students arrive. The cycle accelerates. The Arnold Palmer effect appears to be taking place in reverse.​ The result is something remarkable: a community that matches its promotional materials not because marketing captured authentic campus life, but because authentic campus life was remolded to match the marketing. Reality didn’t create the brochures. The brochures created reality.​
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This is UVM’s “First Filter” (as discussed in Section VI)—that initial, almost unconscious screening mechanism that determines who even considers applying.​ Like a nightclub bouncer who never explicitly states the dress code, UVM broadcasts a series of cultural signals through its marketing, campus imagery, and institutional messaging that effectively display who belongs and who doesn’t, ensuring that by the time students reach the application stage, the vast majority has already been pre-sorted for cultural fit.
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Of course, every college has their own First Filter—UVM isn’t unique in this regard. Harvard signals that it wants the academically brilliant alongside children of donors. Community colleges broadcast accessibility and second chances. Art schools call for creativity and nonconformity. What makes UVM unique is that our First Filter operates at an entirely different level from other schools.
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Picture this: A seventeen-year-old scrolls through UVM’s Instagram feed. Fleece-clad students sip drink coffee against a backdrop of autumn maples. A club is doing yoga on a mountaintop. Another post features a student who apparently grows her own vegetables and makes artisanal soap. The teenager—let’s say she’s from suburban Phoenix, shops at T.J. Maxx, and has never owned hiking boots—feels something. Not excitement. Something else. Otherness.
She keeps scrolling.
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The traditional college application process operates on what you might call practical barriers. A tone-deaf student doesn’t apply to Juilliard because she can’t carry a tune. A student who wants to save money avoids going out-of-state. A student with a 2.6 GPA chooses to save his time and not apply to Ivies. Practical barriers are clean, logical, and entirely defensible. Students sort themselves into appropriate buckets based on measurable criteria (musical ability, financial resources, academic performance).
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But at UVM, the filter is cultural, psychological, and almost unconscious. The girl from Phoenix never gets rejected by UVM—she rejects herself. Not because she wasn’t qualified. Not because she couldn’t afford it. But because looking at UVM’s projected self-image, she intuitively understood that this place wasn’t built for someone like her.
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The most selective filter for UVM isn’t in the application process. It happens in that split second when a prospective student decides whether UVM might be “for them.” And UVM’s Division of Strategic Communications has engineered that split second with ruthless precision, creating a cultural algorithm that narrows their entire applicant pool to a demographic slice so thin it’s practically invisible—all while maintaining complete plausible deniability. They’re not “excluding people.” They’re just being true to their “values”, their “community,” their “Vermont-ness.”
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This is StratComm’s masterpiece.​​​​​​​
The occasional urban style or multicultural event feature isn’t indicative of structural inclusion—it’s proof of concept. These token gestures serve to validate the system rather than challenge it, providing just enough diversity to deflect criticism while ensuring the core identity remains untouched.
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UVM’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives highlight this tension. Significant resources are allocated to training programs, awareness efforts, and support services for underrepresented students, yet these efforts often aim to help diverse students adjust to the existing institutional culture rather than questioning whether the culture itself needs to change.
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What makes UVM’s system so brilliantly insidious is that achieves exclusion through “inclusion.” Look at all the diversity we celebrate! Skiing AND hiking AND camping AND farm visits AND craft breweries AND vintage shopping. So many options! But notice what kind of diversity this is. It’s diversity within an extremely narrow band of expensive, time-intensive, culturally specific leisure activities.
If you’re the kind of person who hikes on weekends and owns multiple fleece jackets, you arrive at UVM and immediately feel at home. The messaging everywhere is telling you exactly that. And somewhere in that first semester, you begin to think: “This is what makes me UVM.”​ But here’s the thing: you’ve been played.
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There’s no denying that granola culture is appealing—it’s UVM’s most successful marketing export.​ Vermont’s economic development consultants, worried about the state’s “aging population and shrinking workforce.” (pg. 7), diagnosed a fundamental problem: Vermont had become better at attracting tourists than residents, better at selling dreams than realities (pg. 92).​​ The strategy? Don’t worry about creating a better reality when you can just play into the dream. Convince affluent, outdoorsy kids they’ve found a hidden gem, when in reality, they’re walking into a sales pitch. This is why granola culture exists in its institutionally preached form at UVM.
What the UVM community has fallen in love with isn’t UVM at all. It’s a brand identity so seamlessly integrated into campus life that we’ve lost the ability to tell where the marketing ends and the university begins. We’ve mistaken a business strategy—one so sophisticated that our student body doesn’t even know it is one—for our authentic student identity.​​​​​
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The next time you see a glossy post of a UVM student carving fresh powder at dawn, remember: that’s not a candid moment. It’s a decision, made in a fluorescent-lit office, about who belongs. And it’s working exactly as intended.